Archive for October, 2008
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Feeling a bit *ahem* rusty this morning. Had a good night with EC though, so that’s good. Just need some lunch before I can code functionally I think.
Far Cry 2 is downloading on Steam in the background. You can’t buy it outside of America but you can get gifted it from a US account, which is a great feature/loophole. Thanks again to Melz for this one. EC was sleeping in the room with the computer so I couldn’t leave it on over night irritatingly, but it should be done in two hours. Can’t wait!
Beta preparations continue.
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Thomas has got me tickets for the football game at wembley this weekend. Saints – Chargers. This time I have someone to root for (or rather someone to root against – Saints are in the Falcon’s division and thus are the enemy in all situations) which is good. Last year’s game, despite having the Superbowl-winning Giants in, was a bit boring; but Chargers – Saints is likely to be quite competitive and at the very least more competent.
Watching football live is not as ohmygodohmygodohmygod great for me as one might imagine – 2am in front of Mike Carlson and an open fire is really the ultimate experience for me. However, it will be absolutely awesome. Last year, Henry and Tim managed to end up drinking with the Giants’ second-stringers in a jazz club in Soho after the game so we also have something to aspire to.
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
I’ve got to stay in the village tonight because Mom’s away. Lizzie’s got a friend staying so she should be ok, so EC is keeping me company. We’ll be heading to see Charlie (for those not up on DSL-lore, that would be the local “pub”). Something about freezing cold nights in the fall; EC and me in the Catherine Wheel… lots of nostalgia. We’ll drink, talk a lot of mainly nonsense, then come back and be rude about random games while listening to Law and Order. Should be fun.
I’m waiting for James (Bursa – original secondary coder on Determinance and now our server admin) to dredge up some backups to get the old updater system working. I think this is definitely the best plan, and I’m a bit annoyed with myself for not having thought about doing this with Determinance. I was probably too scared of spawning rsync in a thread and watching it’s output. Something silly like that.
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Having spent the first half of the day looking at all the options I’ve actually settled on using the original Determinance updating system. Not the big “COULD NOT CONNECT TO SERVER” launcher piece of crap we have on Determinance nowadays, but the old system which uses rsync.
The reason I went away from the old version was because it was an ugly batch file basically which spawned a console window with a lot of text. Not good enough. But I don’t know why I didn’t do the right thing, which is to take the rsync process and wrap it in a pretty window.
I probably won’t have the pretty window in for Friday, so beware beta testers – you will be exposed to an ugly DOS window when you start Synapse.
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
An incredibly important element of Synapse’s main mode, Endplay, is random generation. At the flick of a switch you are given a completely new map to play. Also, you are given a random selection of units. The random map generator is working pretty well right now, but a bit of attention needs to be given to the random unit selection.
For the sake of argument, let’s take four of Synapse’s main unit types (there are several more, but these are the ones we’re playing with most at the moment):
Machine gunner
Rocket launcher
Mine layer
Sniper
In Synapse’s main game mode one team is attacking and one is defending. Generally, Rocket Launchers are good for offense; Snipers and mine layers are good for defense; and machine gunners are vital for both.
Up until today, the algorithm has given each side a completely random selection of units in a team size of between 1 and 8, but sizes of 2, 3, and 4 are most likely. Today Bin and I decided that you probably want to have at least one machine gunner on the vast majority of teams, and in fact you probably generally want half of your team to be machine gunners. (We also decided that team sizes over 5 weren’t that much fun in Endplay, but that’s besides the point today)
The thing is that this is not about finding what the idea team size and composition is at all. It’s about finding the right range. Once in every fifty maps I want something amazingly stupid – like four mine layers vs a sniper. But I don’t want that very often. We could probably define a few core team compositions, say:
MG MG MG RL
MG MG RL S
MG MG MG MG
MG MG S ML
and then say we want to be playing with those… maybe 60, 75% of the time. And the rest should be completely random? Or another 20% half MG/half something else and the rest completely random?
What I’m saying in a bit of a roundabout way is that a generative content algorithm needs to give you good results a large percentage of the time, but it must also give you surprising/emergent results some of the time – that is, after all, one of the main reasons behind using a generative approach at all.
As a final note, there may be some people reading this and saying “Wtf? I want to choose my squad in a tactical game ffs”. Don’t fear, there are all the normal deployment options in Synapse.
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Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
I haven’t made any progress on the auto-updater. I don’t feel quite as bad about that as I might do because instead I’ve just been playing Synapse with Bin, and having a great time. However, I have vowed that the beta will be out by friday and if I don’t get the updater done by then I’ll be handing out zips, which I don’t want to do.
I don’t have much else to relate today. Had fun at the Uni bridge club last night. Played with Clacy, we did alright. Seems like the club has a few good new people this year.
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Monday, October 20th, 2008
It would appear that my offhand and fairly unconsidered comment about the Little Big Planet vs Religion issue has raised some disagreements (including, shockingly, a full-fat 110% disagreement from Malakian). I shall think more on the issue and possibly re-post. As I write this, though, I feel the same. If I’d found out that, for instance, one of the songs on the Determinance soundtrack was religiously offensive (say we’d used a sample which has a dual meaning… or something, I don’t know) then I wouldn’t immediately stand up and say “IT MUST STAY IN”. I’d probably just take the song out. I didn’t make Determinance to be a game making any kind of religious stand and if I found out it was about to inadvertantly make one then… yes, I would definitely remove it because otherwise I’d risk undermining my real point. Which was, obviously, about walking.
But I’m probably missing something here since both Malakian and EC disagree.
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Sunday, October 19th, 2008
After bellyaching about it a lot, I have decided that I’m going to do the Synapse delivery system properly. I’m going to spend next week writing an updater that I trust and that makes it as easy as possible for me to update Synapse often and for you guys to seamlessly be using the correct version. It’ll be a bit boring, but I should be able to do it this week and can put in some other features like a news feed and so on.
Once it’s done, the closed beta will start (I promise) and about ten of you (yes, including you Richy) will be playing Synapse. I’ll be asking you to play at least two – preferably more – endplay maps a day. This won’t take more than half an hour (unless you’re Thomas or EC) so should be doable. Be warned – Beta 0.01 will be weird looking and have a messy interface. But you’ll be playing Synapse, and it should work.
In other news, Lizzie and I were at one of our friend’s birthday parties on Friday, and these pictures of us are priceless enough to post:
I’m lucky with books this month: Anathem is fantastic and I highly recomend that too.
Falcons are on a bye this week, and the rest of the slate looks thoroughly boring. Here’s hoping for a Rams – ‘Boys upset.
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Friday, October 17th, 2008
Mode 7 had a bit of a getting-back-to-know-you session with Synapse yesterday after having not played it for a over two weeks. Getting a fresh perspective on a game you’re making is fantastically valuable, and the thoughts we had during the first game are probably five times as important as any opinions we’ll have during the next week.
We’re going to start the closed beta just as soon as I work out the delivery mechanism. I have a bit of OCD about this because Synapse will be updated often (once a day will not be unusual) and I just want it to be utterly straightforward for the beta testers to just start the game and for everything to work. We used rsync with some success for Determinance’s closed beta but it’s a bit messy and won’t work for the larger beta. I’m investigating igLoader which is a web-deployment platform… don’t know about that yet. To be honest, I should probably just write my own and may well end up doing that next week.
What Synapse needs right now is ten or so people playing a couple of maps a day. That is absolutely the next priority.
In other news, I finished Multireal (go and read Infoquake! Do it! Now!) and now I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s latest 1000 page epic, Anathem. I like it so far.
I’m in London tonight for one of Lizzie’s friends’ birthday parties.
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Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Pretty hungover today – Me and EC went to the opening of the new exhibition at the gallery Lizzie works at last night and had too much beer.
We’re having a Synapse art meeting tonight, and I expect to be working on Synapse tomorrow which is good.
I played the World Of Goo demo this morning and found it a little boring.
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